Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @01:54PM
from the in-this-corner dept.

itwbennett writes: Steve Casselman at Seeking Alpha was among the first to suggest that Xilinx should buy AMD because, among other reasons, it 'would let Xilinx get in on the x86 + FPGA fabric tsunami.' The trouble with this, however, is that 'AMD's server position is minuscule.... While x86 has 73% of the server market, Intel owns virtually all of it,' writes Andy Patrizio. At the same time, 'once Intel is in possession of the Altera product line, it will be able to cheaply produce the chip and drop the price, drastically undercutting Xilinx,' says Patrizio. And, he adds, buying AMD wouldn't give Xilinx the same sort of advantage 'since AMD is fabless.'

Great they just need to make one with a GOOD ARM processor then. Like the A15 or better.

What standard consumer product will that go into? Likely nothing. Meanwhile, now that Intel has bought Altera, they are likely to integrate some FPGA fabric into billions of consumer CPUs, as a standard device available to any app. Xinlinx will be pushed aside, with just a few niche markets, and even those may fade away as Altera takes advantage of Intel's fabs to make FPGAs that are faster/smaller/cooler.

Yes, but while there try to give usable Linux driver, there completely failed to support a recent leading standard distribution like Debian with a native compiler build system and all the fun and efficient tools. There are stick to an outdated Timesys distribution with an unbelievable obsolete build architecture. There still use static dev over udev, proprietary kernel driver build instead dkms, and no packaging.

There urgently need to evolve from a 'hardware staff that try to code application' point of view

No it wouldn't. Intel is already a monopoly, anyone buying AMD would retain the x86 license because the government preventing Intel from controlling 99.999% of the x86 market trumps whatever bullshit is in the x86 license agreement.

Intel's legal agreement with AMD when the original license expired was that AMD could continue using x86 and certain systems (excluded all chipset work and any newly developed tech) but was under the condition that if AMD is ever sold the x86 license goes bye bye. This is a contractual agreement and only the US could stop it and they won't. AMD can't be sold with the x86 license in-tact. Intel would be ecstatic about such a turn of events because they could kill the AMD x86 competition without an iota of government intervention.

The OP you replied to is exactly right, AMD can't be bought. Any speculation that AMD could be purchased by anyone is just garbage. AMD will either survive or it will die, no one outside can buy them without the loss of their primary product (which would make them worthless to buy).

AMD still owns x64 - the x86 license applies to the original 32-bit Intel based work, which is rapidly fading, excepting in sections of the embedded market. So if anybody buys AMD, they automatically get the AMD64, and would, under the above clause, only lose the right to manufacture Intel's 32-bit x86 based CPUs. In the case of server chips, it's the AMD stuff that matters, not the x86. Even if Intel could continue to manufacture Intel64 chips, there is nothing Intel can do about any AMD owner's use of

X64 is an extension of the x86 instruction set which is copyrighted by Intel. In other words it's a derivative that Intel has control over through their copyright on the x86 instruction set. The value of x64 is entirely dependent on the x86 copyright that Intel holds so it's worthless to anyone else without a license for x86 from Intel. I have no doubt that the contract that allows AMD to use the x86 instruction set copyright includes clauses that will protect Intel and their use of the derivative x64 in th

If the x64 was dependent on x86 copyright, Intel wouldn't have had to sign a mutual copyright exchange agreement w/ AMD. They could have just done what AMD did w/ the 64-bit and claimed it as their own. In fact, IIRC, that's how they were about to start, when Microsoft made it clear to them that they were NOT supporting two x64 instruction sets, and since they already supported AMD's one, that would have to be the default. Which is what forced Intel to come to terms w/ AMD.

No, Intel's legal agreement with AMD when the original license expired was something you weren't privy to, nor were you privy to any agreements as a result of Intel using AMD64.

Further, if the agreement is as you imagine it and AMD would lose the license when being bought by another company, AND if AMD was unable to instead continue operating as a subsidiary (keeping the license), the government absolutely would step in and laugh at the prospect of Intel being the only one making x86 CPUs. VIA isn't doing

The government didn't do shit when it came out they were bribing OEMs and rigging benchmarks (which they still do to this day) or used their position in one market (X86) to kill a competitor in another market (chipsets) so what makes you think they would give two shits if they became a monopoly?

You seem to forget the USA is an oligarchy and has been so for quite some time. As long as Intel greases the right palms? They can do whatever they want.

You seem to forget that Intel paid $1,000,000,000 for ICC bullshit.You seem to forget that Intel didn't hold a monopoly in the "chipset market".You seem to forget that the US government has recently rejected several proposed mergers for major corporations, including telecoms, that would have resulted in monopolies.You seem to forget that granting AMD the ability to continue to use their license is a much easier thing than stringing up a corporation and punishing them.You seem to forget that you still have N

The agreement was made public, or at least a copy of it. It's linked to an quoted at other places in this post and it is exactly as I've said. AMD is purchased and AMD looses it's copyright license to x86 while Intel will only lose their copyright license to x64 if they are acquired.

The government won't do anything about a contractual dispute between Intel and AMD. Nothing at all. Intel has sufficient evidence in their possession to make the case to any jury that they are facing broad competition from the A

There is no evidence whatsoever that Xilinx will buy AMD. It's just some random idiot's speculation.
Before this it was Samsung will buy AMD, the Chinese will buy AMD, Intel will buy AMD, etc.

I don't know the situation, but i had read in some/. comment few month ago something interesting: Intel needs AMD (or some other competitor) to exist independently because otherwise Intel will become a legaly defined monopoly, with all the problems that creates to a company.

I did not wrote that it is illegal to be a monopoly (it would be illogical), but "problematic" (of course i bet it's better than having to compete!) - i understand that both in USA and in Europe (i am from Greece) "you have all the eyes looking at you" (i.e., frequent checks about you business practices, e.g., "cost proofs" forms) by law.

I will keep mentioning that i am from Greece (especially when i discuss something that is about USA and my Greek nationality effects my information and/or understanding about the issue), but i respect that you critisizing me directly and using with you Slashdot account!

While you technically may be correct, Intel is a company with a history and reputation of abusing it's monopoly position to put competition out of Business to the detriment of consumers and the market as a whole.

Guess what happens as soon as Intel threatens to revoke their license? I'm sure AMD would be allowed to pursue their X86 endeavors while the anti-trust case began it's processing.

The agreement is fairly bidirectional and this was a big win for AMD, a kind of life insurance. Even if something go wrong with AMD, there still have the unique value of the cross license granted by the agreement. And given the massive market involved, there will be investors seeking for this kind of value. This is a open gate to a big market. No other open gate to this market exists at this moment.

3.4 Intel Copyright License to AMD. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, including without limitation Section 5.2(e), Intel grants to AMD, for use in or with an AMD Licensed Product, licenses under Intel's copyrights in any Processor instruction mnemonic for an instruction developed by Intel, and the related opcodes, instruction operand mnemonics, byte format depictions and short form description (not to exceed 100 words) for those instructions, to copy, have copied, import, prepare derivative works of, perform, display and sell or otherwise distribute such mnemonics, opcodes and descriptions in user manuals and other technical documentation. No other copyright license to AMD is provided by this Agreement other than as set forth in this paragraph, either directly or by implication or estoppel.

If AMD has to obtain a copyright license to the x86 instruction set from Intel and instruction sets in the CPU world are similar to APIs in the programming language world, why shouldn't Google also be required to obtain a copyright license from Oracle for the Java Standard APIs?

It's probably down to the way opcodes exploit common functionality between opcodes and use parts of the opcode to trigger certain logical blocks in the chip. That means a lot of the glue logic will have to be the same, if you want the chip to run efficiently.

Yes, but even ARM chips have an ADD instruction whose byte encodings differ from x86 and not licensed from Intel, obviously. We're not talking about copyrighting core functionality (integer addition), but rather all the little copyrighted details like assembly language syntax, byte encoding of the instructions, functional description of instruction. There must be dozens of ways to do integer addition, but AMD follows Intel's x86 way for compa

that could open up a lot of possibilities to the more adventurous enthusiasts/hobbyists/developers.

Those doors are already open. What you want is a Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, or one of the variants. If you need something with some real programmable logic, get a Cypress PSOC. The top of the line PSOC eval board is $100. The development environment is free for all of the above solutions. The PSOCs even come with some amount of programmable analog.

Waiting for an x86 chip with built in FPGA is a pipe dream, and a stupid one at that. Anything they made would be hideously expensive because it would be lo

There are plenty of dev boards out there but I found Xilinx's ISE horrible to get started with and while I found Altera's Quartus easier I wouldn't say it was a walk in the park. That's why I got my DE0 nano to do something at least while my papillio is gathering dust.

Getting started with CUDA is way easier, it would be nice to see it reach cuda levels of ease of use and see the same range of books in Amazon and blog articles covering how to

The Intel-Altera deal, while beneficial for Altera shareholders, is not any kind of huge win for Intel. Intel was already Altera's fab partner, and there's very little incremental revenue compared to the cost. $2B/year for a $17B acquisition, even at a modest discount rate, is a questionable ROI.

The reason is that this deal is questionable is that system design considerations vary considerably, and a fat CPU like an Intel Xeon is not always the best match for a networking application with an FPGA that close. Most of these server-side applications are, in any event, I/O bound in a server environment. That means fast backplane technologies for interfacing the various physical layer devices for networking and storage. Integration of programmable logic rather than putting it on a daughter card with a dedicated interface defeats the purpose of the flexibility that the FPGA provides in this environment, and that's to be able to bridge new and emerging standards while standard products eventually come in and take up the slack. Too little programmable logic and you have to replace the entire part. Too much, and you're killing your margins even now that gates are supposedly "free". Why would a system architect bother taking the risk on that without substantial advantages over the lifetime of their rack-mount beast? And this is essentially true whether or not the die is integrated or put in an multi-chip module or 3D die stack.
Even if we consider other applications such as artificial intelligence and image processing, there are already alternatives out there including dedicated processors and GPUs that are doing much of this today, and they're off-the-shelf parts without dependency on the host CPU which - again - would be an I/O bound operation that you wouldn't necessarily want to involve the CPU in directly.

Bringing this to Xilinx, AMD - as the article suggests - has even less presence in server. More importantly, AMD is always 1-2 generations behind in process technology versus Intel, which translates to even greater sensitivity to how much FPGA one devotes to the die. There is no Xilinx fab relationship with AMD since it's effectively fabless. Xilinx and Altera also play in other spaces where x86 is either not relevant or insufficiently so to justify integration (e.g. automotive, broadcast). All of the above points for Intel-Altera apply even more for AMD-Xilinx.

Even in 2015, we're still dealing with external GPUs and Ethernet PHYs on small motherboards. Unless an application reaches true ubiquity and the cost-benefit is clear, integration for integration's sake is a losing cause. If Xilinx and AMD merge, it may very well hurt both companies. Stay tuned.

Good analysis. I honestly am a bit baffled by Intel's purchase of Altera (especially for the price they paid). I don't think this means there will suddenly be a scramble to buy up FPGA companies (Altera and Xilinx control something like 90% of that market). It's not clear that having an FPGA on your SOC will be a clear win in the datacenter - FPGA programming is hard partly because it's hardware development which is in many ways very different from software development, and partly because the tools suck. T

The point is, Intel plays by different rules and their Altera purchase represents a smaller percentage of their total worth. But the most important reason you shouldn't copy Intel is if there is an x86+FPGA market, you will never be able to beat Intel at it. If Intel wants your niche, they will take it from you. If Intel has already moved there before you even started, now you don't even have the ability to establish a new market, losing the only minute advantage there is.

I recommend trying to come up with a new idea that Intel isn't actively pursuing. Get some customers and lots of patents, then when Intel wants to take it from you, they at least have to do some costly patent settlements. [latimes.com]

I agree wholeheartedly with the Parent, Xilinx should not copy Intel's strategy, but rather, come up with a new one...

But sometimes managers are not creative enough. If the folks at Xilinx want to copy Intel's strategy on the cheap, they can try to buy Via/Centaur from Formosa Plastics Group.

They make the Via Nano and related chipsets, the group is small (so less culture clashes, things will be done the Xilinx way). Have you read of the culture clashed between the red Team (ATi) and the Green Team (AMD) Whe

Xilinx and AMD aren't a good match. Xilinx has not been targetting the server market. They target custom embedded systems. (See DARPA challenge robots). Now that Altera is focusing on the server market and not on embedded, Xilinx can probably take over that entire space. It seems pretty clear that Altera(Intel) will dominate the server market, Xilinx will dominate the embedded market, Actel will dominate the space/irrational government contractor market, and Microsemi(Lattice) will remain largely irrelevant

Ok, so Cyrix was bought by National Semiconductor, which in turn sold Cyrix to VIA. I wonder how much of Cyrix ended up going into VIA's line of C7/Nano processors. . . Did anyone on here actually own a Cyrix machine?

Meh. Only five years ago AMD had very competitive products in the server range. Opterons were efficient and cheap.I remember Windows Azure launching in Europe with mostly Opterons inside and Steve Jobs buying that capacity to launch iCloud.

The servers at my workplace used to run on Opterons, too. Then our provider changed to Intel (you could still get AMD, but you needed to pay extra) and eventual server upgrades lead to total disapperance of AMD from my previous company.